6 Principles to Follow For Amazon PPC Campaign Structure

6 Principles to Follow For Amazon PPC Campaign Structure Speaker 1: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den podcast, the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today, it's summertime here in Austin. It's a beautiful time of year. I'm looking outside at beautiful green trees, live oak trees swaying in the breeze, beautiful blue sky. I've got my outfit to get on a boat later. I think I'm ready for it. Like Travis, here I come. But first, very important thing to talk about. This is actually one of my favorite topics. I actually find it is one of the most misunderstood topics and we're going to be digging into it over the course of a few episodes. This episode is going to be principles based, focused in on what principles you need to succeed at this thing that we're going to be talking about, which is of course campaign structure on Amazon. So there are six principles. I'm Amazon PPC campaign structure, and I think that these six principles will make your life and the way that you think about campaign structure incredibly easy and straightforward. So this is theoretical. In a future episode, we will do tactical. We will actually look at examples. Now, I've done episodes in the past as we've been creating content here since 2017. We've talked about campaign structure. And what I want to do differently this time is really give people principles that they can just walk away with and actually do the work. Clearly and understand it. Now, the biggest issue with campaign structure is that anytime someone does something, it is often used in a really rigid way that actually inhibits optimization and inhibits some of the fluidity that I believe people need to really find success with their Amazon PPC campaign structure. So today we're going to talk about those six principles, which should be combined And some sort of Captain Planet with our powers combined will be your North Star when coming up with campaign structure. Now, let us jump in. Here we go. The first one relates to the level of segmentation. I call it the Goldilocks principle of Amazon PPC campaign structure. Goldilocks. We all know the story of Goldilocks. Goldilocks breaks into the house, breaking and entering. She goes and tries the first soup. It's too cold. The second one, it's too hot. The third one, just right. And you want to be just right with your Level of segmentation with your campaigns on Amazon. You need a balance here. You do not want too much segmentation, nor do you want too little segmentation. Here's what I mean by that. You lose if you have one campaign with all of your impressions inside one singular campaign. That would be a complete mess. You wouldn't be able to understand what's going on with all your impressions. At the other end of the spectrum, you do not want a million campaigns with one impression each. Now, when I do this, I'm actually not looking so much at impressions. I'm actually looking at amount of orders per campaign, per individual target inside that campaign. People get into a lot of trouble when they over-segment, where they say, if something gets one order, I'm breaking it out into its own exact match. And then they have a whole bunch of keywords Most keywords get maybe one, two orders per month. You end up with hundreds of keywords with very, very little data. It is very difficult to optimize that account. It is very difficult to control that account to get it to do what you want it to do. Henceforth, my first principle is the appropriate level of segmentation you need inside your campaigns. The Goldilocks principle. We're not going to segment way too much. We're not going to segment too little. There is a perfect median. And as we get into some more tactical stuff in the weeks to come, we'll be looking at what that median is. My favorite rule to live by here to preview some of that is really, I think of it in terms of orders per week. And I would like in a perfect world, all my keywords, all my targets to have at least one order per week. We'll get into that in future weeks. Principle number two is the race car principle. People create works of art in F1 race cars. And you want to know what? Every single season, they're tweaking it. They're trying to make it better. So this principle gets you into the mindset that there is no such thing as perfect campaign structure. It literally does not exist. Anything anyone ever says about campaign structure As soon as you do it, you begin to get data telling you to do different things, either double down on what you did or veer away from it. We will look at some examples over the coming weeks, and the race car principle is really this concept that you have to look at what's going on in order to improve your campaign structure. A really simple example of this ...is, imagine you pop in a bunch of ASINs inside a single ad group, and then you begin to realize that some of these search terms that they're appearing for only apply to some of these products. You need to have a fluid perspective on campaign structure. You need to be able to identify that search term that only applies to some of those products in your roster, and you need to pair these off and tweak your campaign structure that you had. You will discover duplicated search terms inside your account. Sometimes duplicate search terms are just fine. Sometimes they're not fine. You need to be able to look at your campaign structure and understand that it needs to be tweaked over time. You might segment out a keyword and then you discover that this keyword gets such a low search volume and I put it in an ad group next to another keyword with lots of search volume. As we look at this over the coming weeks, you will notice There's moments where you've identified these issues and you need to make adjustments. So the second principle to follow is that there really is no such thing as a perfect campaign structure. Campaign structure is like a bid. It's something that you can tweak and play with to impact your results that you're getting. So that's really important to think about. You want to tweak your campaign structure in a similar mindset to how you tweak your bidding or your keywords, so on and so forth. So campaign structure is something that you continuously ask yourself. Does this need to be segmented further? Does it not need to be segmented? Do I need to group it with something? Is there a reason to break this out? That kind of thing is really important to understand. The next principle is the relevance principle. Relevance related to the thing that I just talked about. You will find that certain search terms may be only applied to certain products. You might find that only products are appropriate under certain product targeting where it's like, Hey, it doesn't really make sense for me to target that product with this particular agent. Type thing. So this is a very simple one. Most people understand this, but you want really high relevance. You want to know who is going to see your advertising and does it really make sense if I serve my product to these searches or to these products. So really aligning that perfect match. This one's very easy, right? This one's very easy. I'm selling a particular product. The only product on my desk right now is This USB dongle because I have a MacBook and you need to buy $500 of dongles. So if I'm selling some kind of Dongle, I might find that sometimes people are searching for a computer part plus dongle that doesn't actually apply to my product. I need to make adjustments to be relevant to every single impression. And when you do that, you generally win. So the third principle of relevance. The fourth principle, grouping by theme, grouping by goal. This is a really powerful one because it allows you to put products and targets slash keywords In organizational structure that allows you to accomplish those goals. For example, imagine if you had a competitor market share strategy. You wanted to gain market share over a particular competitor that you're very comparable with. So imagine you had A competitor with 10 products and you just had this all over your account. You had sometimes you had the branded keywords for that competitor brand in one campaign and then another one and then another one and then another one and you're targeting and you know you have 30 campaigns where you're targeting product targets and then that competitor is in a couple different places there. It'll be really hard for you to budget that competitive market share attack because it'd be so spread out. So thinking in terms of themes, Thinking in terms of what you're trying to do with a particular campaign or group of campaigns allows you to organize your campaigns in really clear, fluid ways. So you listening to this episode, think about this. What kinds of goals do you have? A lot of people might just have a sales goal, a cost goal, but as you begin to get more experience with Amazon PPC, you begin to have, well, this particular family, I want to increase their sales. And then I want to increase their sales in a couple of various different ways. I want to do some ranking on these keywords. I want to do some competitive market share grab on this one. I want to do some brand defense as well. Grouping in terms of themes makes your life very easy and it allows you to identify those themes and be like, oh, I better Get rid of this theme or this goal because it's compared to all the other goals that I can clearly see. I'm having a really hard time with that one. I can make adjustments to that particular approach. So segmenting by goals and themes, very important. The next principle. Is that there are structural limits to how you can actually organize things. Amazon does not have a product based structure, meaning I do not take one of my products, put it in and then begin applying all these different campaigns to it. You start with a campaign selection and you have certain limitations with that of how you can spread out your budget. You know, if I have two products in a singular ad group in a singular campaign, I cannot say give 50% of my budget to product A and 50% of my budget to product B. I need to actually work within the structural limits that Amazon has. So I need to say these two things, if I want separate budgets for them, need to be in separate campaigns because budgets are set at the campaign level. Another example here, let's say you want to make a top of search play. If you want to make a top of search play for a certain keyword with a certain product, you cannot do this in a multi-keyword campaign because placement settings are set at the campaign level. So there's a lot of issues and things and limitations that you have when it comes to campaign structure that you just need to work with. So this is another principle to follow. And lastly, is the Rome Principle. Shout out Italian American. Shout out to Italy. The Rome Principle applies to the sense that when you have an existing campaign structure, right? If you're listening to this, you have an existing campaign structure. This is related to the race car where you optimize it over time. But the thing here, Rome wasn't built in a day. I have never Scene. Full blown. Let me pause everything and rebuild it completely new. I don't think I've ever seen that work out seamlessly. If your current campaign structure is awful, You have bad relevance. You have over-segmented in some areas, not segmented enough in other areas. You're all over the place. You still have an aged campaign with history, and there is immense value in that. It is better to work within that ship of Theseus style, where you replace one board at a time, where you build it brick by brick, this new thing, and you attack your campaign structure over time. I love doing that. It paces yourself. It allows you to get validation along the way because there are so many nuances when it comes to campaign structure. The SKU size that you have, the types of parent and children that you have, the niche that you're in, the product lifecycle that you're in, the pricing of your product compared to competitors, all of these different factors are influencing your perfect campaign structure. The search volume of everything that you have, right? Like everything is impacting it. Doing it slowly over time, like every week you're modifying a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and you're sort of working towards it. Now, obviously, if you have something that's clearly not working, that's different. But most people have stuff that is workable. So I generally like to work within what is there and then over time make it better, work on it slowly. So I generally find that that works best because you will learn things along the way. You will discover, oh, I had all these search terms together. I put them in a campaign and together and I noticed that keyword A has 10 times the amount of search volume as keyword B. I didn't realize this initially. You want to be thoughtful and meticulous there, right? Like you want to sort of do it piece by piece over time. And I generally find that that is a really good approach. So to recap these principles, six principles of Amazon PPC structure. The Goldilocks principle, you don't want to segment too much. You don't want to segment too little. The race car principle. You want to understand that perfection is not a destination. It is a process. You keep on working on it over time. You keep on looking for areas to segment more, segment less, to move things around, to switch up your budget. You want to, of course, be incredibly relevant. Grouping by theme or goal makes your life very easy. There are structural limits that you have to work within. For Amazon, the structure of Amazon, and of course, take your time when you edit campaign structure. So in the next few weeks here, we're going to have more tangible understandings, as well as some things that I do with campaign structure that I believe are universal. Some things a little bit more specific that can be applied to some more specific situations. I love this topic. I hope you do too. If you made it to the end of the episode, I'm sure you do. Anyway, my name is Michael Erickson Facchin here in The PPC Den, and I hope to see you next week here in The PPC Den podcast. Adios. Unknown Speaker: I've campaigned and picked keywords. I've got my bids, set placements too. I've made mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of wrong keywords. We are the creepy city, my friends And we'll keep on damaging We are the PPC Den. We're talking about Amazon. No time for Medicare, because we'll fix the game.